. . . muttered the ogre

Travis Corcoran reports:

With Lego on the brain, and Google on the fingertips, I’ve learned a few things. Like: the planet’s children spent 5 billion child-hours last year playing with Legos. And that when Lego, Inc. (or, perhaps GmbH . . . I don’t know) discards a set of moulds, they throw them into the concrete foundations of a new Lego, Inc. building. And that there are 102,981,500 different ways to combine six eight-stud Lego-blocks. And that a block’s height is 6/5 the length of a SLU (Standard Lego Unit). And that there’s a word “SLU”. And that some adults design new lego kits, buy the parts, print up instructions, then repackage and sell them to each other (no one-off artsy Lego deathcamps for these guys!). And that my kludgey looking design for a clock’s gear-train (60:1 stepdown, then a 12:1 stepdown) is in fact the best theoretically possible given the constraints of the gears available.